Letting multiple CakePHP apps talk

CakePHP is getting really popular, so naturally, there are quite a few sites out there using it. If you’ve been using CakePHP long enough, sooner or later you will want to have 2 or more of those apps talk to each other. Setting CakePHP up to act as a webservice is pretty easy. Teaching the other apps to talk to that webservice takes a little more work. Jesse (over at TechnoGeeks) and I have been working on just that.

So far we have one app authenticating against the other. This can be very useful if you have a central user database, and don’t want to maintain users across every application you create. We used XML as the transport, so this could easily be used for applications that aren’t written in CakePHP. You can get all the details in Jesse’s article: Authenticating a CakePHP App Against a CakePHP Webservice.

We hope to extend it and allow standardized CRUD functionality across the applications. During that time, we may move the code into a datasource. But who knows.